Sunday, March 30, 2014

The Domestic National Security Threat, Part IV-B: Government and Media Warnings of Constitution-supporting Americans Being a National Security Threat Are False

Editorial Note: Emerging information and actions over the past few years has demonstrated that the United States government and a significant portion of the left-leaning population believe that those Americans who firmly believe in the Constitution are a potential threat and that the government one day might be justified in conducting military operations against them. Is there really a threat from those who value the Constitution or are the government and its leftist allies purposely creating strife for their own nefarious purposes? SCI analyzes this in a multi-part series.

“I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

“And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.”

And on an ironic note, Spencer Ackerman is now working for The Guardian. (Full disclosure: I asked to write for The Guardian and was turned down—politely, by the way.) The Guardian has become famous for being the leading way in exposing U.S. intelligence, which in turn helps enemies of the United States—terrorists included. But the media outlet also has made the news recently because of the arrest of Moazzam Begg on terrorism charges. UPI reported the following on Begg’s arrest:

Former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg was arrested with three other individuals Tuesday in England for Syria-related terrorism offenses, authorities said.

Begg, 45, was arrested in Birmingham and is suspected of attending a terrorist training camp and facilitating terrorism overseas, the Guardian reported.

The United States had held him in Guantanamo Bay, but charges were not levied and he was released in 2005.

Two other men and a woman have also been arrested on suspicion of facilitating terrorism overseas.”

And just what does Begg’s arrest have to do with The Guardian other than The Guardian reporting on it? Begg wrote for The Guardian. Breitbart News Network provided additional information:

Begg wrote candidly for the British publication about his attitude toward the United States and the UK’s War on Terror. He was honest about the quality of facilities at Guantánamo, in one column agreeing that the Abu Salim prison in Libya and the Bagram facility in Afghanistan were both significantly worse than being detained at Guantánamo Bay. As a UK national, Begg spent much of his efforts writing for the newspaper working to amass evidence that the UK had participated in the torture of detainees during the War on Terror. “The evidence is too compelling and the case too politically sensitive to even attempt to brush aside,” he wrote in one column, alleging that British agents were “physically present every step of the way” in his capture. He wrote:

I’ve never been to America – America came to me, but why? Because the same intelligence officers who came to my house in 1998, to whom I offered a cup of tea, were the same ones who reappeared to haunt me as “spooks” during my years as a US captive.”

Begg also wrote promotional stories in The Guardian about organizations established to aid Guantánamo detainees. One such organization, the Guantánamo Justice Centre, he described as a group providing “aftercare for Guantánamo returnees who have not being [sic] given the help and assistance they need.” As Begg wrote about Guantánamo detainees as “victims,” he also blamed the actions of some of the greatest enemies of the United States on the country itself. “Abu Yahya [al-Libi, high-ranking Al-Qaeda member] and [fellow high-ranking Al-Qaeda member Anwar] al-Awlaki, I believe, were both creations of the US-led ‘war on terror,’” he wrote in the newspaper, condemning the deaths of both by American drone strikes. As enemies of Muammar Qaddafi, he wrote, both were opportunities missed by the United States to form allies. Al-Awlaki was a United States citizen, born in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Ackerman, at best, is a biased writer with a sketchy background. People can decide how much value they can get from his writings based on how well they think they can separate fact from fiction in what he reports. His assessments about the danger of “far-right terror” are without a doubt heavily flawed and as a whole junk.

The Associated Press published the following on this group in 2012 after the authorities arrested them:

Prosecutors in rural Long County, near the sprawling Army post Fort Stewart, said the militia group of active-duty and former U.S. military members spent at least $87,000 buying guns and bomb components. They allege the group was serious enough to kill two people — former soldier Michael Roark and his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany York — by shooting them in the woods last December in order to keep its plans secret. . . .

Prosecutors said the group called itself FEAR, short for Forever Enduring Always Ready. Pauley said authorities don’t know how many members it had. . . .

Pauley said Aguigui funded the militia using $500,000 in insurance and benefit payments from the death of his pregnant wife a year ago. Aguigui was not charged in his wife’s death, but Pauley told the judge her death was “highly suspicious.” . . .

In a videotaped interview with military investigators, Pauley said, Aguigui called himself “the nicest cold-blooded murderer you will ever meet.” He used the Army to recruit militia members, who wore distinctive tattoos that resemble an anarchy symbol, she said. Prosecutors say they have no idea how many members belong to the group.

The prosecutor said the militia group had big plans. It plotted to take over Fort Stewart by seizing its ammunition control point and talked of bombing the Forsyth Park fountain in nearby Savannah, she said. In Washington state, she added, the group plotted to bomb a dam and poison the state’s apple crop. Ultimately, prosecutors said, the militia’s goal was to overthrow the government and assassinate the president.

The anarchist link should have been one clue that this small group of people was not right-wing or a group of patriotic Americans. Anarchy does not fit with patriotism and in fact could easily be linked with left-wing ideology (such as, for example, the Occupy Wall Street movement).

But the media and left-wing advocates rejected such analysis. Instead, they want the arrest of FEAR to fit their narrative that right-wing and/or patriotic Americans are a domestic national security threat, and they point to FEAR to this day as being an example of “right-wing terror.”

Yet this accusation increasingly becomes difficult to sustain. Reuters recently reported that the authorities now have convicted Aguigui of murdering his wife and their unborn child to get the $500,000 insurance payoff to fund the group. Reuters reported that:

A military judge found Private Isaac Aguigui, 22, guilty of asphyxiating his pregnant wife, Sergeant Deirdre Aguigui, in 2011 when she was stationed at Fort Stewart in southern Georgia, said base spokesman Kevin Larson.

If one is trying to link FEAR either to left-wing or right-wing ideology (as opposed to being a group of thugs unlinked to the right or left), with which ideology would someone who murders an unborn child fit better?

Wade Michael Page was the guy who shot up a Sikh temple. He was booted out of the Army in the late 90s. Kevin Harpham did fail at bombing a parade. Harpham, was also booted in 1999 from his Army job as a Red Leg cannon cocker at Fort Lewis, which is in no way related to anything that has to do with making and emplacing bombs. The Fort Stewart murderers had a plot to assassinate the President, but they were a bunch of headquarters wienies who had no skills related to the task that they planned. They murdered two people who they thought might expose their plot, but people who haven’t been trained by the military do that everyday. McVeigh was a Bradley gunner in the first Gulf War, nothing in the 11MB20 Skills Manual is remotely related to anything he did that day in Oklahoma, just like the others, including Eric Rudolph. . . .

The only person Sterman interviews is our old friend Daryl Johnson, who wrote the now-famed Homeland Security Department report which warned of veterans as the greatest threat to our security. Johnson was fired soon after and his sole mission in life is to get morons like Sterman to vindicate his idiot report. The problem is that there are too many people in the media who don’t know what the military actually trains people to do, so since it sounds scary to them, it must be scary to everyone else.

On Wednesday, Mother Jones ran an article making a shocking claim: more Americans have been killed by conservative terrorists than by Islamic terrorists since September 11, 2001. “While America has been fixated on the threat of Islamic terrorism for more than a decade, all but a few domestic terror plots have failed,” the article explained. “Between September 11, 2001, and the end of 2012, there were no successful bomb plots by jihadist terrorists in the United States …. [R]ight-wing extremists killed 29 people during those 11 years.”

But is it true?

The Mother Jones piece is based on a study by the New America Foundation and Syracuse University’s Maxwell School. But that study routinely labels non-right-wing murderers right-wingers, and labels basic crimes involving murder “terrorist attacks.”

So the flaws are amplified through the media and left-wing pundits publishing numerous articles making it seem as if reports of the dangers of right-wing and/or patriotic Americans are coming from a variety of sources when they really mostly are coming from one (bad) source.

On top of all this, the Combatting Terrorism Center (CTC) study and article mentioned in Part III (and earlier in Part IV-A) probably has even more flaws than what SCI initially noted.

Overall, our findings indicate that the frequency of far-right violence – in this case, homicides – committed by so-called lone wolves has not experienced a recent increase as some have suggested,” Gruenewald said. “More fatal attacks by far-right loners, lone wolves and lone-wolf packs occurred in the 1990s than in more recent years. In fact, there has been a downward trend since 2001. This finding questions claims by media, politicians and other researchers that far-right, lone-wolf attacks have increased and pose a growing threat to U.S. security.

The CTC study attempted to address more than “so-called lone wolves” on the so-called far right. In fact, the term “lone wolf” appears to only appear once in the report, with the document often focusing on groups. At the same time, the report did attempt to paint individual attacks as part of a bigger picture and an indication of worse things to come. In short, the more time that goes by the more flawed and unreliable the CTC study and associated article appear to become.

So all the government and media accusations mentioned in Part III of right-wing and/or patriotic Americans being a serious domestic national security threat are seriously flawed and in many cases outright false. The examples of so-called right-wing violence either aren’t connected to right-wing ideology or in some cases are more closely associated with left-wing ideology.

This, of course, is not surprising. The media has a habit of misidentifying random (or left-wing) acts of violence as “right-wing.”